Ahh the app store. It's just like the internet, except the websites are mini apps, and a mega corporation gets to control whats on it. And takes 30% of everything you make. Brilliant.
There is more to it. Using apps instead of websites we're killing the whole concept of making information and services available using a standard protocol. That's like going back over 30 years, even before gopher. Then there is the cloud->mainframe similarity, with data and services being moved somewhere into the net where the user has no control over his/her own data, and the whole email/usenet->social media migration which puts private and public communications in the hands of corporations having no intention of guaranteeing interoperability with competing systems.
Basically the industry screwed 40+ years of IT development, not just in a technical way, but they did it behind shiny graphics and animated emoticons, so nobody really cares.
I think the interesting thing to note here is that for most end users a standard protocol is not nearly as appealing as a standard user interface. Like how most iOS apps follow common navigation paradigms, so users don't need to spend time learning each new one. And how people tend to prefer buying things on Amazon instead of any random webshop. And how WeChat has almost become a little web of its own with custom chat UIs for e.g. ordering pizza. If open software for consumers is ever to stop being beaten by these walled gardens, it needs to get a ton more UX people involved and focus on the end user UX, not just the technical implementation.
I'm not saying the App Store is perfect, not by a country mile is it. I'm just saying if you compare it to the Play store, and the wider Internet, holy moly do walled gardens look nice.
That is very true too. I often wondered what would have happened had someone created say 10 years ago an email client with strict protocol compatibility but employing an higher abstraction layer where discussions/attaches are managed automatically just like in a Whatsapp chat (chat -> mail list) using a similar UI. Probably most users would have rejected the idea because they had no intention to learn a new thing nobody was using. So, back to square one.
(1) Load AOL and visit keyword "UBER" to get started requesting a car now!
(2) Type UBER into your web browser location bar then hit control-enter to visit http://UBER.com/ and get started requesting a car now!
(3) Load your app store and search for "UBER" to get started requesting a car now!
Compared to a website, where you get to keep 100% of zero?
Users will pay for apps (not much, as a rule, but something), but will not pay for web sites. Third-party advertisers might pay, if you're lucky, and if you don't mind treating your users as a commodity, but the users themselves will not.
Subscriptions to web-based services don't count as paying for web sites?
Those are only 3 examples a ton of people pay for.
If you provide a good service, you will get subscribers. News have been available for free for decades thanks to OTA TV broadcasts. That's why people don't pay for it.
Niche journalism needs to have subscriptions since they can have way less views and people looking for news on that niche are ready to pay.
Would you pay a subscription for Flappy Bird?
I don't do that on the app store either.
And software was sold way before app stores existed, so what's your point?
I refuse to pay monthly for stuff that shouldn't need backend services.
There are somewhere over a billion web sites, dude. The number of those that are profitable with a subscription model (as opposed to being supported by advertising, or not being profitable at all) is a rounding error -- in the fourth or fifth decimal place.
Content/news is a terrible example since there is an oversupply of poor quality content driven by providers who believe content supports their advertising revenue rather than the other way round.
Love to be able to pay for quality content.
Same with Spotify.
Both models are OK with me.
What I don't wanna pay for is every newspaper wanting a monthly subscribtion either I read something or not.
Not a great example.
In the end reality is that I just pass on buying subscriptions and would probably prefer buying subscriber access to a website if they made an app facade for the site that handled payment and login. The UX of web sites and subscriptions is that bad.
There's more to the Internet than websites. Believe it or not, there are lots of protocols out there, not just HTTP.
But ya figure for a large company of creative geniuses they could figure out how to democratize security so that the whole system isn't wholly owned and controlled by a single entity.
We are not much better, sadly. https://floens.github.io/Clover/gp_unavailable.txt
Really?
https://play.google.com/intl/en_us/about/developer-distribut...
> (4.5) Alternative Stores. You may not use Google Play to distribute or make available any Product which has a purpose that facilitates the distribution of software applications and games for use on Android devices outside of Google Play.
You have no chance of bootstrapping an alternative store outside of Google Play. Sideloading APKs is not how users get software on Android. Amazon failed hard with their attempt, and they pumped tons of money into it by paying developers to give away their apps for free; that, and they shipped hardware that has their store preloaded. Still didn't even make a dent.
Apple could keep the default to what it is on the iPhone right now, but should at least allow signed apps from other stores as a non-default option, even if they don’t allow unsigned apps at all.
That makes even less sense.
It's always been Apple vs The Rest Of The World.
Imagine a city where public parks are all bought out by private entities, that is the Internet right now.
We have less and less public space in the digital world and that is not looking good for the future of democracy.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/24/apples-app-of-the-day-feat...
Getting featured on the App Store is one time, possibly incredibly beneficial, event, but it is not a marketing plan.
As you point out, there are alternatives. Why do you think developers have massively and overwhelmingly opted-in?
After all, there are alternatives to bridges, why do the travelers opt to pay the fee?
-- Obviously, /s
Are there? Really? No, they're not. No one who isn't in tech is going to install F-droid. Few people will uninstall untrusted sources, or even know what that is. Fewer Apple users than ever jailbreak their phones.
For over 90% of the market, no, there are no alternatives (other than a mobile website). Due to the non-standard nature of ARM and SoC/binary drivers, we don't even have a real alternative OS for old Android devices that's universal like most Linux distros on the PC in the 90s (although PostmarketOS is making some huge strides in this area).
30% is an insane cut. Bandcamp sells music with a 15% cut, literally half of Amazon/Google/Apple. I always prefer it because I know the band gets more money and I get a higher quality version of the song without a patent encumbered codec (FLAC and OGG downloads are supported).
But no, there are no real alternatives. AppStore/Play are bastardizations of the software repo concept from Linux.
If Google Play was a real package managers, it'd keep standardize shared jar files across apps (dependencies to reduce massive app size) either by mirroring maven repos and signing dependencies or creating their own system, and they'd also allow for easily adding 3rd party app trees.
Both Apple and Google are closed walled gardens, where everything you need has to be contained in your bloated package, and where their corporate overlords get final approval of what is in and out.
Not if you want to build a secure system which runs on an iPhone, there aren't. JavaScript crypto is fundamentally insecure; the only secure option is a native client.
Talking about my own experience, once we've made clear that In-App Purchase wasn't a fit for us as we already had our own payment system (we are a SaaS business), things got way more difficult to us. As you can imagine (but I didn't at the time), our app would be in review for weeks sometimes, we started to see arbitrary denials and a lot of "issues" not present on their guidelines started to be identified on our apps.
If there is one thing that I'm now sure is that, if you decide to not play their game (even though following their rules) there will be retaliation.